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Monday, 7 September 2009

The Inconvenient Truth about Kashmir (gatewayhouse.in)

M.D. Nalapat

When floods hit the largely Buddhist enclave of Leh in Kashmir
recently, the chief minister Omar Abdullah, representatives of state government
and the Indian army were out providing relief. Absent, however, was the
presence of Kashmiris from the rest of the state, notably the normally vocal
Valley Kashmiris, in expressing support for their fellow co-habitants. They
seemed unconcerned about the tragedy.

This went by unnoticed by the national and international media.
But it was not lost on the majority of Kashmiris, confirming their views that
those in charge of the state see themselves as being responsible only to one of
the six major groups that form Kashmir: the Valley Sunnis, the Shia, the
Buddhists, the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Gujjars. That single-pointed attention
has kept wider Kashmiri interests unattended, but kept the Valley of Kashmir in
the global spotlight.

Today, Kashmir is very much part of the cauldron that is "Af-Pak",
the storm that is raging across the Pashtun belt in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
As in Af-Pak, the base for the jihad that is being waged in Kashmir mainly
comprises a small fringe of a single community – the Valley Wahabi Sunnis, who
are 1 million of the total 6.7 million Kashmiri Muslim population.

In the case of Af-Pak, the indigenous Taliban fighters are
almost entirely Pashtun, and from those human pools nurtured by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Saudi
Secret Service during the 1980s to fight against the USSR. In the case of
Kashmir, those involved in the current intifada are Sunnis - mostly Wahabis -
from the Kashmir Valley who have financial and other links with the military in
Pakistan and the numerous Wahabi religious trusts and foundations in Saudi
Arabia that work at exporting their 300-year old faith across the world.

The difference between Afghanistan and Kashmir is that in the
former, the bulk of the population fears and detests the NATO
"occupiers" almost as much as - or more - than they do the only
organized force standing up to this "army of occupation", the
Taliban. In Kashmir, only the Valley Sunnis (and in particular the growing
Wahabi element within them) regard the Indian security forces as being an army
of occupation.

The rest of the state’s population is fearful of a withdrawal by
those same security forces or a "peace accord" that hands over to the
Wahabis full control of the entire two-thirds of the state that was in Indian
control at the time of Jawaharlal Nehru's January 1, 1949 ceasefire.
(Subsequently, around an eighth of even that truncated area was taken over by
China by 1957.)

The media in the countries that comprise NATO are perceived as
"free". However, very few have pointed either to the extreme
unpopularity of NATO forces within the general population of Afghanistan, or –
in contrast - to the support for Indian troops among the Shia, the Gujjars, the
Bakkerwals, the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists of "Indian" Kashmir. Thanks
in some part to the reluctance of successive governments in India to expose the
true nature of the militancy in the state, but mainly due to the briefings and
activism of the diplomatic corps of the NATO powers, the Kashmir jihad has come
to be characterized even in the Indian media as comprising a loveable group of
"freedom fighters" bravely battling the Goliath of the Indian
security forces.

ETHNIC CLEANSING

That the Valley Sunni-Wahabis in Kashmir have already succeeded
in ethnically cleansing the Kashmir Valley and in monopolizing the state
administration and 81% of central resources for the 18% of population that they
represent, is testimony to the failure of Indian diplomacy. This has, thus far,
focussed only on Pakistan's role rather than on the character of the Kashmiris
active in the separatist movement. As a consequence, there is near –zero
international reportage of the human rights abuses carried out by the Valley
Sunni-Wahabis, including the denial of the right to education and the right of
women to have a career. There is hardly any coverage of the intimidation and
expulsion of Sikhs and Hindus from the Valley.

Parsing the speeches of India's Prime Ministers from I K Gujral
to Manmohan Singh, one searches in vain for adequate - or in many instances,
any -recognition that over 80% of the population of "Indian Kashmir"
is opposed to separatism, and indeed, would themselves like to administratively
free themselves of Valley Sunni-Wahabi dominance. The floods in Leh should give
New Delhi pause.

The enthusiasm of media outlets like Al Jazeera is
understandable; that channel makes no pretence of objectivity in reporting any
issue that involves Wahabis matching wits (or fists) with others. But reading
"liberal" English-language newspapers such as the New York Times, The
Guardian and such, one can be forgiven for believing that India is a religious
dictatorship intent on snuffing out the freedom of a persecuted secular
minority that seeks to create a free society by attaining independence from a “dictatorial”
entity like India.

KASHMIRIYAT AND TALIBAN

Recent "objective" articles on the stone-pelting ‘intifada’
in Kashmir have mentioned the scene at a large Srinagar hospital, without once
mentioning the fact that the injured among the security forces is thrice as
large as that among those active in the intifada. Of course, as Valley
Sunni-Wahabis have monopolized employment in the Valley since Sheikh Abdullah
was re-installed by Indira Gandhi in 1974 (This was soon after the creation of
Bangladesh by the Mukti Bahini, assisted by the Indian army, in 1971), all
the non-uniformed sources quoted by the media are Valley Sunni-Wahabis.
If those reporters are aware that this group has converted the gentle Sufi
school of Kashmiriyat into a Talibanesque entity starting from the 1980s, or
that there exist Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Shias across the state of Kashmir
besides the Valley Sunni-Wahabis, the same is not evident from the tearful
prose of the reports.

The New York Times is just one example. Magazines and newspapers
from Finland to France, UK, Canada to Australia, to those from the so-called
Muslim world have glossed over the fact that the intifada in the Valley seeks
the legitimisation of a system of exclusion in Kashmir, that would give
permanency and further impetus to the already-existing discrimination in favour
of Valley Sunni-Wahabis.

Richard Holbrooke and those US officials eager to dip into
"conflict resolution" would be delighted at such reportage, which is
reminiscent of that seen during the 1990s. Whether it was CNN or the BBC, the
Daily Telegraph or the Washington Post, the on-going jihad in Kashmir was
portrayed as a "peoples’ movement" that deserved the same sympathetic
coverage as did the operations of the mujahideen against the Soviets.

It was during that period that more than four hundred temples
were destroyed in Kashmir by Wahabis, and when almost the entire indigenous
Hindu Pandit population was driven out. It was during that period that women
not wearing a burkha were subjected to abuse and worse, and when any form of
worship other than those sanctioned by the Wahabis was subject to intimidation
and assault.

However, one looks in vain in the columns of the quality
newspapers of the West for any except glancing reportage of this sombre reality.
Almost all the negative coverage is reserved for the Indian security forces.
That trend was diluted only after 9/11, but has since re-emerged, assisted by a
slew of NGOs whose interest in human rights stops with the Valley’s
Sunni-Wahabi population. Ditto with the focus of the press corps in Srinagar -
the local element of which is made up almost entirely of Valley Sunni-Wahabis -
even those reporting for Indian newspapers and television channels.

Apart from the propensity of newspaper proprietors in Delhi to
turn to the diplomatic enclave for validation, there is another reason why this
is so. Those who are not Valley Sunni-Wahabis, or those not backing the
intifada in their reportage, are likely to have a very brief lifespan in
Kashmir.

The state has seen severe intimidation of the media, on a scale
that brings to mind the depredations of the Khalistanis in Punjab during the
1980s. None of this is of any interest to the western media or sections of the
Indian media, resulting in giving a cosmetic gloss to those engaged in creating
yet another Wahabi enclave in South Asia.

TAPESTRY OF TERRIBLE
INSURGENCY

Why does the failure of the Government of India to better
explain the truth about the intifada in Kashmir, matter? Because the warp and
weft fashioning events in Kashmir are the same as those weaving the tapestry of
the terrible insurgency in Af-Pak. The ideology of both struggles is the same
as is the funding and the sources of inspiration.

If the Manmohan Singh government - despite the fact that the Indian
Prime Minister sees the US in the same way as Bengal’s Communist Party Chief
Prakash Karat regards China - has kept Washington away from overt involvement
in Kashmir, it’s because of the recognition that the US military has reached a
stage of controlled hysteria that drives it to seek salvation from a Pakistan
army.

Years ago, during the Kargil conflict, an Indian airman was
butchered and mutilated by his Pakistani captors. Rather than show to the world
what India was fighting against, this incident was covered up much the way the
present hospitalisation of more than 1,000 security personnel operating in
Kashmir has been. Concealed also is the opulence of the lifestyles of those
making a handsome living by traveling around the Middle East groaning about
"Indian tyranny" and asking for financial help to fight the
Hitlerites Indian state.

They needn’t bother going that far. For each time there is
violence in Kashmir, the Indian treasury opens its doors even wider to enable
yet more largesse to flow into the very pockets responsible for the troubles.

Kashmir is the international blind spot in the international
jihad of the Wahabi International Agency. It is the insurgency that North
America and Europe have cosied up to, together with several elements of the Indian
media. What has been left by the wayside is the majority of Kashmir that seeks
an end to the intifada and a beginning to productive, secure life.

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About Prof. MD Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MDNalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.